crud

frost this morning, thick enough that I don't really want to risk riding without full studs. Treadmill/stairmaster for me. Ugh, boring.

My MP3 player has decided that when playing music, it'll just play one or two tracks then freeze solid. I have to do a 10 second force power-off to revive it. I think I'll RockBox it and see if that works any better. I'll have to keep my eyes open for another one, either a Fuze or a Clip+, nothing else I've tried works better for audiobooks, and I can pick up a 4G Fuze for < $30, and they're durable; this one has had the crap beat out of it for 3+ years now and is badly scratched and dinged and is only now starting to have trouble.

Various

My MP3 player lives again, courtesy of RockBox. RockBox gives a phenomenal amount of functionality, though it's definitely akin to installing Linux on your MP3 player. There's a ton of power there but the UI to get to some of it is obtuse, and even some basic functionality has been made more difficult.

I found an ebay seller who has #3 keychain video recorders in stock (in China). That's the good one. It's much nicer for helmet mounting, and looks ideal for putting on balloons, kites, etc. They're about $12 shipped so I got a couple of them.

Am I just being a fool?

Got a new Discover card today, and they of course took the opportunity to tell me what a great opportunity that I'm missing by not using my Discover card to get cash back.

I got into a bit of an argument with the guy, during which time he tried to tell me that he'd never heard of the merchant paying a fee when customers use credit cards. Eventually he relented on that.

But he seemed to be utterly without clue as to why anyone would care that the merchant is getting hit with those fees. "They're paying those fees anyway, and they're going to raise prices as a result." "Yes, but the more people who use their credit card, particularly ones with a higher fee structure such as Discover, the more and quicker they'll have to raise prices."

He actually insisted that the fees that merchants pay are FIXED and are not based on sales. I don't know if he figured that a main street shop with 2 employees paid the same as a mall store doing $100k/day, at that point he was clearly not worth arguing with. I did tell him that I've run retail shops before and I knew what fees were paid. There ARE generally fixed fees but they're minimal when compared to the percentages.

I stopped short of suggesting that he google "Tragedy of the Commons." I did tell him that I'd been sucked into that game fairly recently but that I'd decided that it just wasn't actually that moral to do so, and I wasn't going to play the game anymore.

After the call, I got to thinking that actually, due to marketing and data sharing agreements, merchants actually may not make out that badly, at least, large merchants. I still pay in cash/check when I go to the feed store in town and buy dog food. And I'd really rather just opt out of the whole thing.

Maybe even frequent flier plans are the same, I don't know, I've never investigated them since I don't fly enough to take advantage of any of them.

Comments?

Definition

Kitten: a device by which a pistachio shell on a tile floor may be transformed into a half hour of family entertainment.